It baffles me how ancient people were able to come up with such detailed stories, characters, myths, rituals, etc. It’s one thing to look at lighting and assumes a god is controlling it, it’s another thing to come up with that god’s entire life story and an entire pantheon with hundreds of gods interacting with one another. How were the ancient people able to come up with such claims without any shred of evidence? Even modern day writers struggle to come up with such detailed and complex stories. Can someone explain to me how myths, religions came to be and how the ancient people were able to come up with all of that and how it became popular and why the people at the time believe such insane claims without questioning them?
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It’s not all made up at once. All these stories get told and retold, and people add to them over time, interpret figures in different ways. It’s like a big game of telephone where details get added and changed over time. We end up with multiple versions of the same stories, characters being fused together or split in two. Rome wasn’t built in a day, and neither was their mythology.
I remember reading that one of the possible reasons that people saw fairies, trolls and such, was because their food was often mouldy, which could have caused hallucinations. From that perspective I can imagine that they often experienced their gods/demons and tried to rationalise it by developing a background story over time, i.e. myths, religion and so forth.
Oral traditions were extremely important to ancient peoples.
With no written word key knowledge had to be passed from generation to generation and myths were key tools for this.
Not only did most include a creation myth, but most also had moral stories to teach children the rules of society, and various myths often related to the stars.
Constellations for example used to be far more important. They were a way of mapping the sky and identifying time like when the herds of animals would return or when to plant crops. Having myths associated with those constellations was a good way to remember and pass that knowledge down.
Such stories weren’t created in a single generation either. Simple stories were expanded upon and retold generation over generation each tweaking them slightly. The best orators in the tribe likely being given the task to pass on such stories and were encouraged to embellish them along the way, if anything just to make story time more interesting for those listening.
What started off probably as stories to appease children’s questions and pass down key knowledge would become folklore and the basis for religions. Some of it was useful and key information to pass on, and others just became stories.
If you have an hour, [check out this talk about the history of Yahweh](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mdKst8zeh-U). A lot happens to a god over the centuries, ya know?
> Even modern day writers struggle to come up with such detailed and complex stories.
I don’t understand this part. Which ancient mythologies are so complex that a modern writer couldn’t imagine it? Why would it be difficult to construct a detailed backstory for a god? Regarding Greek mythology in particular, I frankly don’t find anything especially imaginative about any of those stories; I mean they’re *fine*, but the creativity and depth aren’t any more remarkable than any fantasy or sci-fi literature I’ve ever read or watched.
I don’t really understand why you think they *wouldn’t* be able to. Ancient humans who lived within the last 40,000 years or so were basically cognitively identical to modern humans in terms of intelligence, behavior, and mental capacity for abstract and symbolic thought, and you’re talking about people who lived much more recently than that. What in your mind is the impediment?
Because that’s not how it started. What we intend today as “god” is not the same as they did. Same goes for “spirit” or “soul” or other complicated concepts. It started way simpler than that.
Just as today, they were dealing with “forces”. Storms, heat, cold, grief, love, desire, animals, whatever. These forces were out there, in their world, conditioning them. But differently from other animals, they didn’t simply react by istinct. Humans not only percieved that forces but could consider them independently from their actual presence. They had cognitive abilities and the urge to describe their surroundings to others, just as much as we have today. So, maybe, they saw lightining coming from the sky, and they were scary. But also sun came from the sky and that was good. Or rain, and that could be both good and bad. One thing for sure, they should have considered the sky as a huge “force”, right? They probably talked a lot about the sky, and the indo-european word for sky was “djews”. Wich MAYBE is the root for the world Deus.
Or maybe it took a different route. Maybe there were some farmers, and someday one of them killed a goat on his field, spilled its blood on the ground and the same year that field gave him an unbelievable harvest. He told his story, and who listened than told it again and again. After a while, slaying goats became a ritual, and the indo-european word for it, “tyein” MAYBE became “theus” in ancient greek, and spilling (gheu-) MAYBE became gott in germanic and later god in english
The point is it wasn’t our same concept of “god” as a super-human. At first It was just the perception of something keeping things together instead of total randomness. Once the concept was established, Myths were build starting from that and used to describe the world according to this perception, that we have and animals don’t. They just had to be intellegible and meaningful enough to be usable. They didn’t have to be “true”. Trueness itself is a different concept today than it was 2500 years ago, and even back then it was quite a novelty due to greek philosopher that started talking about the “logos”.
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